Concept

From the Wikipedia:

1.

"The hacker ethic comprises the values and philosophy that are standard in the hacker community. The early hacker culture and resulting philosophy originated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the 1950s and 1960s. The term 'hacker ethic' is attributed to journalist Steven Levy as described in his book titled Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, written in 1984. The guidelines of the hacker ethic make it easy to see how computers have evolved into the personal devices we know and rely upon today. The key points within this ethic are that of access, free information, and improvement to quality of life."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_ethic)

2.

"In 1984 Levy established the 7 commandments of the Personal Computer revolution. It was the base for the Personal Computer and Internet social ethos:

1. Access to Computers - and anything that might teach you something about the way the world works - should be unlimited and total.

2. Always yield to the Hands-on Imperative.

3. All information should be free.

4. Mistrust authority - promote decentralization.

5. Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race,or position.

Book: The Hacker Ethic

Source of the concept is the book: Himanen, Pekka. The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age. Random House, 2002

Quote from the back cover of The Hacker Ethic, by Pekka Himanen:

“Nearly a century ago, Max Weber articulated the animating spirit of the industrial age, the Protestant ethic. Now, Pekka Himanen - together with Linus Torvalds and Manuel Castells - articulates how hackers* represent a new, opposing ethos for the information age. Underlying hackers' technical creations - such as the Internet and the personal computer, which have become symbols of our time - are the hacker values that produced them and that challenge us all. These values promoted passionate and freely rhythmed work; the belief that individuals can create great things by joining forces in imaginative ways; and the need to maintain our existing ethical ideals, such as privacy and equality, in our new, increasingly technologized society."

Bio

Pekka Himanen is a Finnish philosopher and researcher on the information society, most well-known for his landmark book The Hacker Ethic, which updates Max Weber's classic on the Calvinist work ethic. In his book he shows how network society is both exacerbating the Calvinist work ethic to the point where it becomes immoral and unsustainable, while also creating as a counter-reaction the new hacker ethic, which is based on a peer to peer ethic. The hacker ethic in this broad sense of cooperative working should not be confused with the more specific sense of the ethic of computer hackers.

Discussion

A view on the hacker ethic by Richard Barbrook

From the "Manifesto for ‘Digital Artisans:

4. We will shape the new information technologies in our own interests. Although they were originally developed to reinforce hierarchical power, the full potential of the Net and computing can only be realised through our autonomous and creative labour. We will transform the machines of domination into the technologies of liberation.

9. For those of us who want to be truly creative in hypermedia and computing, the only practical solution is to become digital artisans. The rapid spread of personal computing and now the Net are the technological expressions of this desire for autonomous work. Escaping from the petty controls of the shopfloor and the office, we can rediscover the individual independence enjoyed by craftspeople during proto-industrialism. We rejoice in the privilege of becoming digital artisans.

10. We create virtual artefacts for money and for fun. We work both in the money-commodity economy and in the gift economy of the Net. When we take a contract, we are happy to earn enough to pay for our necessities and luxuries through our labours as digital artisans. At the same time, we also enjoy exercising our abilities for our own amusement and for the wider community. Whether working for money or for fun, we always take pride in our craft skills. We take pleasure in pushing the cultural and technical limits as far forward as possible. We are the pioneers of the modern."
(http://www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk/hrc/theory/digitalArtisans/t.1.1.1 )

On the necessity of open collaboration

" The free sharing of information - in this case code as opposed to software development - has nothing to do with altruism or a specific anti-authoritarian social vision. It is motivated by the fact that in a complex collaborative process, it is effectively impossible to differentiate between the "raw material" that goes into a creative process and the "product" that comes out. Even the greatest innovators stand on the shoulders of giants. All new creations are built on previous creations and themselves provide inspiration for future ones. The ability to freely use and refine those previous creations increases the possibilities for future creativity."
(http://news.openflows.org/article.pl?sid=02/04/23/1518208 )

Tony Prug: the hacker ethic and the protestant ethic

For Himanen_(2001), it is the hacker ethics that drives the
development of Free Software. Hacker not meaning just a computer
specialist of certain type, but any person who practices some of the
hacker ethics. It was Levy_(1984) who first formulated main point of
hackers ethics as: a) access to computers (and anything which might
teach you something about the way the world works) should be
unlimited and a total, hands-on approach is imperative; b) all
information should be free; c) mistrust authority and promote
decentralization; d) hackers should be judged by their hacking, not
bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race or position; e) you can
create art and beauty on a computer; f) computers can change your
life for the better.

Hackers are inclined to become obsessed with their work. They pursue
it relentlessly, often at the expense of other aspects of life.
Because of this, they have been portrayed as anti-social, weird in
ways which ``normal human beings cannot understand. Yet, their
work differs significantly from what we consider today to be a
dominant paradigm of capitalist society, the Protestant work ethic.
According to Himanen, it is social motivations that separate those
two ethics: in the Protestant ethic work has invaded leisure and
aspects of private life, like finding a spouse and having friends,
are frequently carried out work. Those social activities at work
serve in the Protestant ethic to distract attention from the idea
that pursuing one's passion should happen at work too (Himanen,
2001: 51). Although for hackers what they do (but not necessary the
employment) is passion, why would people in such large numbers work
in their leisure time too just to give the result of their work away
in the public domain, for free? The linking of a contribution to
society with passion is what for Himanen characterises the hacker
ethic a powerful model. Recent empirical research in which 680 Free
Software programmers were interviewed concluded that enjoyment is
the biggest reason why hackers do what they do (Lakhani_and_Wolf,
2003). A paradox that remains theoretically unresolved is how can
people with such socialization elements (high priority to work,
frequent aspects of strange communication with other people) and
values of individual freedoms have at the same time such a firm link
to the society and what they consider good for it. The company
Google understands this well and implements aspects of it in
practice by allowing its engineers to spend twenty percent of their
time at work working on their own technical projects, not
necessarily linked with what company does. For a hacker, ``making a
living is a depressive, unbearable option that he replaces with
``it's my life, as Himanen_(2001,_40) correctly observes. The
curse of the Protestant ethic of work as necessary suffering that
one is obliged to withstand, the iron cage built by our rationality,
as Max Weber concluded on the character of this modern lockdown of
humanity (Weber, 1965: 182), thus, even more paradoxically, gets
hacked, reused in unexpected, unintended ways, by the people engaged
in one of most rational tasks, computer programming. Is that not
what hackers are doing to the computing tools and global
communications networks built to a large extent for military and
profit making purposes, reusing them in their own way, redefining
some of the core postulates of our time: why do we work how we work,
what is our relationship with the product of our work and what do we
do with the results? The answer to the question "why" is for hackers
clear: because it is pleasure, not suffering. How? In collaboration,
sharing the results and internals of what is produced, with open
access for anyone whose material conditions allow them to observe
and engage in what is done. Can hackers have the last laugh, as
simultaneous co-creators of the iron-turns-silicon cage and its
hackers?

When Max Weber concluded that the Protestant ethic is a driver for
he development of capitalism, his main argument focused on an ethic
of dedication to work, and, most importantly, of saving the profits,
which in turn leads to the investment of accumulated capital. This
was one of the key elements how, according to Weber, the capitalist
machine got moving. Castells (1996: 200) agrees with Weber and adds
that to explain society today, we need to have ``some kind of
cultural glue that makes social actors behave in similar fashion
on a large scale, and that purely rationalist explanations, for
something as large as emergence of capitalism, aren't enough. There
are also recent works (Mikkonen_et_al.,_2007) in which very similar
conclusions are drawn, this time from empirical data collected,
through interviews and questionnaires, from communities of
programmers. The findings reaffirm some findings of Himanen's Hacker
Ethics, most known of all writings in this direction, stating that
motives for participation in open source and free software
production today are mainly for the material benefit of
participants. Yet, Himanen's research left many questions open and
posed hacker ethics as a threat to protestant ethics, while
Mikhonnen's research concludes that some sort of special ethics of
hackers is a myth. Overall, these researches agree with Weber's use
of concept of the Protestant ethic as the spirit of capitalism and
analyze hackers in relation to it, starting from the hacker ethic as
being in opposition to the Protestant ethic, and concluding that
reality is lot simpler, since hackers end up joining the forces of
capitalism and the Protestant ethic in the end.

None of this was convincing enough for me, starting from Weber's use
of only a few elements of Protestantism, followed by a superficial
use of his work in the sociology of hackers during last ten years[6].
They agree with Weber all too quickly, and offer no close reading of
Weber's work, nor of the key concepts (religion, Protestantism,
rationality) that made that work possible. Himanen's work touches
upon the kind of reading that I believe is necessary, but it is
still playing it far too safe in far too many areas.
I'm tempted to start from the opposite position. For the benefit of
his conclusions on Protestantism as the spirit of capitalism, Weber
presented Protestantism as a single, unified whole, although he was
fully aware that that was not the case. Using Weber's conclusion
presents us with an all too easy to use, yet deceiving, formula. To
use it as label, as a quote that one can just attach to one's work,
as Castells and others do in explaining social phenomena of hackers
and our computing age, betrays both the complexity and the richness
of Weber's work and of the situation in which we find ourselves
today.

Hackers are not a challenge to the Protestant ethic, quite the
contrary. I'm tempted to claim they are far more protestant than
what capitalism can bare, hence their uneasy fit. Open Source is a
movement that, with quite some success, attempted to ``pacify Free
Software, to bridge the gap between Free Software and capitalism.
Project Oekonux is a good example of an opposite theoretical
approach. The move of the Open Source initiative to bring Free
Software closer to capitalism shows that: a) there is a gap between
the Free Software movement and capitalism; b) without a significant
institutional intervention and re-interpretation that gap can not be
overcome; c) more than practice (since practice of Open Source
doesn't differ that much), it is the founding documents, principles
that Richard Stallman stands by so fiercely that are the bite that
capitalism can not subsume, swallow in its original form. Re-
interpretation work that Open Source, and to a large extent
publisher O'Reilly, did, was necessary for inclusion of Free
Software into capitalist economy. The task that I set for myself is
similar to that of the Oekinux project, with a different path of
investigation: to conceptualize, give a theoretical form to that
which resists capitalism in Free Software. An expression of the
hacker ethics needs to be hacked to enable future, social, hacks."
(http://rabelais.socialtools.net/FreeSoftware.ToniPrug.Aug2007.txt)

Luther's Five Solas and Free Software Principles

Tony Prug:

"The basic theological points of the Reformation are called the Five Solas. The first one, Solus Christus (Christ alone) refuses Pope and church as Christ's representatives and preaches that Christ, and no one else, mediates between God and man. The second one, Sola scriptura, refuses the need for a Church to interpret the Scripture and the Church's monopoly on such interpretation. Protestants believe that people should read the Scripture on their own and make up their own minds about it, without external interpretation. The third one, Sola fide, asserts that it is on the basis of faith alone that believers are forgiven. The fourth one, Sola gratia, claims that believers are accepted without any regard for the merit of their work; God decides on his own. The fifth and last one, Soli Deo gloria, preaches glory to God alone, and denies that saints of the Roman Catholic Church, including popes, are worthy of the glory assigned to them.

Not all of this maps to hackers and Free Software. Yet, if we are to speak in terms of spirit like Weber did, in terms of the general mood of the Five Solas, there are striking similarities. Throughout, like hackers and Free Software, the spirit of Protestantism is in favour of direct engagement of individuals, and the proliferation of interpretations and organizations to support these if needed. It arose against the centralization of the Roman Catholic Church, privilege in interpretation of people chosen by the Church, and against the Church's extraction of wealth from its believers. At that time, those were anti-institutional, anti-hierarchical and anti-bureaucratic principles. Although the high number of branches of Protestantism was criticized by Calvin, principle was withheld in practice. This resembles the hacker's principle of forking a project: if you don't like what is someone else doing with some project, you take a copy of the source code15 and start work on it in the direction you wish. The principle of scripture alone is similar to the hacker's dedication to the code, the text that makes all software what it is. All doubts about interpretations can be resolved by looking at the source. For all hackers, to dive straight to the source code is not the last resort, but rather the first course of action. Interpretation is personal, direct and engagement with no proxy is in most cases the only right option. Trust in people's ability to dive straight to the code, to make up their own mind by reading it, to make a critical evaluation, to decide for themselves, are key for hackers. This unmediated contact with the scripture and trust in people is embodied in the Free Software principle of ``freedom to study how software works and adapt it to your needs, access to the source code is precondition for this Stallman (2002). Aiding capitalism, allowing economic emancipation of individuals was for Weber a side effect of Reformation, not its intended purpose, regardless of its insistence on individual material gains, and its dislike of capitalism, demonstrated by Luther, for example. This paradox is best seen in the quote of John Wesley where it is clear how well Wesley is aware of the paradox (Weber, 1965: 175). Capitalism didn't follow main principles of Protestantism, it followed some of them, those that suited it. If it had followed Protestantism to a large extent, it wouldn't be so difficult to fit hackers and Free Software into capitalism. The dark mood in which Weber concludes his book, the last few pages that are misused as a label so often, state the problem more precisely: ``Puritans wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so(p.181). Puritans, not all Protestants.

If there is one important part of the hacker ethics that might go against the Protestantism, it could be its insistence on doing the work as enjoyment and improving the technology so that it can serve humanity and so that humans can be lazy. Two hackers of the highest standing, Larry Wall (inventor of programming language Perl) and Yukihiro Matsumoto Matz (inventor of influential programming language Ruby), both stated it on many occasions: for a true hacker, laziness is a virtue, and computers are there to serve humans. Both of them are very religious, and Matz even served as a missionary for his church. Linus Torvalds, one of the most important hackers today, is known for statements that can be seen as fundamentalist. Consider this from the Linux coding style guide: ``Heretic people all over the world have claimed that this inconsistency is ... well .. inconsistent, but all right-thinking people know that a) K&R are _right_ and (b) K&R are right16 (K&R are Kernighan and Ritchie, inventors of programming language C). Or, this from one of his interviews: ``Which mindset is right? Mine, of course. People who disagree with me are by definition crazy (Until I change my mind, when they can suddenly become upstanding citizens) (Barr, 2005). Richard Stallman, because of what some considered inflexibility when discussing core premises of Free Software, was seen as a fundamentalist. Debates about preferences to which software, or which programming tool, to use are frequently referred to as religious wars17. All of this is left mostly untouched under the framing of business friendly Open Source. This is not a coincidence. Anything that gets included into capitalist economy has to be stripped of any previous attributes and represented as a mere commodity (Zizek, 2006), an entity to be produced, sold and utilized. There are two sets of complexities that are erased in a single move of becoming open source: that of Free Software prior to its inclusion into the capitalist economy, and that of the commodity form itself - base entity of the capitalist economy."
(http://rabelais.socialtools.net/FreeSoftware.ToniPrug.Aug2007.html)